Craft and Creativity
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On Saying What’s Difficult
Want more craft tips? Be the first to receive our writing advice in your inbox. How Stephen King Helped Me Grapple with My Nonfiction Project Earlier this week, for reasons I’ll discuss below, I happened upon a Stephen King quote from On Writing. Here it is: “The most important things are the hardest to say. They…
Making Poetry Evocative
A good poem evokes emotions that linger long after the final line. How do poets accomplish this? Close attention to language and imagery matters—but so does the arrangement of those words and images. A poet’s work, whether the poet knows this or not, often works towards what T. S. Eliot called the “objective correlative.” Let’s…
Storytelling As Empathy
A good story builds bridges. The reader, and the characters themselves, come to understand the subjects of the story better. A rich person and a poor person; two people of different races, creeds, or nationalities; even, yes, a human and a talking monkey. When good fiction guides us down that bridge, we come to understand…